Page 5 of The Legend Next Door
I’m met by a steady cerulean gaze. An ocean becalmed. Shallow water without so much as a ripple. It draws me in without making me flinch.
“I know,” he says lightly. “Luca told me.”
That means something to me, but I’m not sure what. In the beginning, right after it happened, Luca couldn’t stop talking about it. He told everyone. Cashiers at the grocery store, kids at hockey practice, Uber drivers. Everyone. And then he stopped. As time passed and we got farther from the event, he stopped mentioning it. Stopped telling people. Started keeping the name he knew her by—Mommy—as something precious that exists between him and me only.
Jeremiah doesn’t blink or look away. Neither do I.
“What was she like?” he asks.
The question stuns me, partly because I’m not expecting it and partly because it feels like a gift. An opportunity to say her name. An opportunity to bring her back to life for a second. “How to sum Liz up in a few words?” I say more to myself than to him. I mull it over and harrumph softly when I get there. “She was kind of wild, kind of unpredictable, and also steady. Really steady, really dependable, and soft and sweet in ways she only showed me. She was one of those people who always had my back. Not a little. She had my back in a way that was borderline crazy. Even if I was wrong about something, she’d have my back in the moment and come back to the issue later, when we were alone, to give me hell about it.”
He smiles and something about the way he does makes me keep talking.
“Everyone says not to make big decisions in the first couple of years after the loss of a loved one. They all say it. Every therapist, every support group, every article, they all say, ‘Now’s the time for survival, not the time to make changes.’ And I get it, believe me, I get it. I’m sure it’s very good, sensible advice. It’s just that when I woke up on the one-year anniversary of her death, I couldn’t breathe. I couldn’t get air in our old house. I couldn’t open my eyes and see the paint colors she picked out, and I couldn’t see the closet with her clothes in it.
“I also couldn’t move her things out and see the closet bare. I tried that. I packed her things up at one point and felt so crazed by the empty shelves that I unpacked them again. I don’t know what stage of grief that is, but believe me, it’s not a good one.
“The bathroom cabinet made me angry without her products in it, and I hated everything about the kitchen without the sound of her yelling, ‘Put the platesinthe dishwasher, not on the counteraboveit.’”
I take a much-needed breath and say, “I pulled Luca out of school for a few days, and we flew out here to visit Liz’s parents and her sister Amy. I thought we needed a break. A little change of scene, you know? Some time for him to play with his cousins. Honestly, I don’t even know how it happened. We were just driving up the road on our second day here, and I saw anOpen Housesign. I stopped the car for no discernible reason, and Luca and I went in. By the time we came out, I owned the house.”
Thinking about it now gives me the same feeling I had then. Bone-deep disbelief with an unhealthily large side-serving of confusion. I lean closer to Jeremiah and whisper, “I’m not even sure I like the house.”
Actually, I’m pretty sure I don’t. It’s not my style. I like newer houses with wide-plank flooring, lots of glass, and a pared-back, uncluttered style. This house has narrow-plank hardwood floors that creak when you walk on them, pediments and shutters galore, and a ton of Palladian windows. On top of that, it’s way, way too big for Luca and me.
The back of my neck begins to sweat as I’m hit with another onslaught of an increasingly familiar feeling.
What the fuck have I done?
How did we get here?
“I’ve made a terrible decision,” I say to myself as much as to him. “We left Tampa. We left my team. We left all our friends. All Luca’s friends, and his school, and his mites club and, and…”
“Sometimes you gotta make bad decisions,” Jeremiah finishes for me. He says it with a great deal of authority. It’s not at all where I was going, and it startles me out of my rambling. “Sometimes you’ve got to do the wrong thing.” He nods slowly as he doubles down. “Sometimes you’ve got to take everyone’s well-meaning advice, roll it into a tight ball, and drop-kick into the stratosphere because sometimes the wrong thing is the right thing for you.”
He says it quietly, voice so earnest and kind it almost makes me laugh. “I gotta say, Jeremiah, I’m kinda on the fence about whether you did the right thing dropping out of psychology. You could’ve really helped people…or something.”
Theor somethingmakes his lips quirk.
“Yeah, well”—his tone drops to one that’s conspiratorial, almost professional—“I was planning on becoming a sex therapist ’cause…er, basically, I’m kind of a perv, but then I realized I was headed for a life sitting in a dusty room fighting an irrepressible urge to yell, ‘Just leave him already!’”
I don’t almost laugh this time. I laugh from my belly. From low down. From the old days. From the before time. It’s a rough, harsh sound that darts around my body, jabbing at various pressure points in my ribcage until I’m doubled over.
There’s an almighty crash from inside that has me on my feet at a speed only parents of small children are able to achieve. Luca appears in the doorway at the same time I do. He looks sheepish.
“So,” he says, dragging the word out. “Bad news about the plane. There was a problem with the wings.”
“Oh no, what happened to the wings?”
“They don’t work.”
“What do you mean?”
“The plane took off at the top of the stairs, like this”—he uses one hand and a swift motion to show me the trajectory—“it flew for a little while, but then it went down.”
“Luca, did you throw your plane down the stairs?”
“No, Dad,” he says like I’m failing to grasp a very simple concept. “I didn’t throw it. Iflewit.”
